oukewldave:We have multiple email groups, but corporate seems to find the need to tell everyone in the whole company "news" about other locations that have nothing to do with us. Then the brown nosers need to reply all and make a comment about the email. Like if the email is saying this location had 6 months without an "incident", they would respond with "congratulations!!" and "keep up the great work!!". At least 10-15 people for the next 4 hours. Pretty annoying, and I'm new there.

At my company, when an exciting news or congratulatory email goes out to an entire department people are actually encouraged to reply all to acknowledge and encourage. It is so frustrating when 50 or more people are racing to be the first to congratulate the kudos email, then responding back and forth in a mass email orgy of unproductive back patting. Drives me crazy.

Where I work all messages from up-on-high that are sent to a large list of individual recipients, as opposed to a group, are BCC'd. The body of the message contains something along the lines of, "send replies to e­mailadd­ressekaf­c­om".

Sid_6.7:Where I work all messages from up-on-high that are sent to a large list of individual recipients, as opposed to a group, are BCC'd. The body of the message contains something along the lines of, "send replies to emailaddress[[nospam-﹫-backwards] image 7x13]ekaf[* image 7x13]com".

I worked in an office that was kept cold enough to handle the hot flashes of someone in management. The dress code was business casual, so you could put on a layer or two, long sleeves etc. Then one day we get an email ordering us to come dressed for a Hawaii theme day, with cabana shirts and shorts.

Oh, the reply all with my thoughts about that event. I wish I had a copy for myself, not just in my personel jacket next to the order from that hot flash queen to can my ass.

I look at it as getting out of that shiathole of tech support about a year before it was relocated to India. $14/hr (in 1998) was hardly worth it.

When I was in grad school, someone put every grad student on campus on an unsolicited mailing list, and then sent out an emailing telling them that. There was an unsubscribe link included in the main body. I happened to be at my computer when the first email came in, followed closely by the first pebbles of the impending avalanche of "unsubscribe me" emails, so I hit the link and bailed before my inbox got crushed.

Lsherm:As a former mail administrator for a very large organization, there are multiple methods of dealing with this, but all of the easiest ones involve disabling the list for a few hours, or disabling its ability to send, then parsing through queued messages and deleting anything that's a reply-to the original subject line. If it's a true list, then people are just replying to one email address that distributes the email among list members.

Sounds like either someone was literally asleep at the switch or they just didn't give a fark.

Sorry, I don't have the head count to deal with this right now. We have other more urgent priorities.

Harry_Seldon:Lsherm: As a former mail administrator for a very large organization, there are multiple methods of dealing with this, but all of the easiest ones involve disabling the list for a few hours, or disabling its ability to send, then parsing through queued messages and deleting anything that's a reply-to the original subject line. If it's a true list, then people are just replying to one email address that distributes the email among list members.

Sounds like either someone was literally asleep at the switch or they just didn't give a fark.

Sorry, I don't have the head count to deal with this right now. We have other more urgent priorities.

Sid_6.7:Where I work all messages from up-on-high that are sent to a large list of individual recipients, as opposed to a group, are BCC'd. The body of the message contains something along the lines of, "send replies to emailaddress[[nospam-﹫-backwards] image 7x13]ekaf[* image 7x13]com".

Makes this sort of thing not work.

Yes, but this was a case where the list got emailed instead of an individual. I think if you're actually intendning on emailing a large list, and you do not want to start a Reply All valanche, is to send it To: yourself, Bcc: the big list .

when I used to support email, in an org of over 20,000 users, there was a policy in place that an email could not be sent out to over 500 users total,regardless of the number of distribution groups. Any more would require a written authorization from a higher level exec.

Same thing happened about a year ago when I worked at a large financial institution who's name rhymes with Hell's Cargo. Some guy in India meant to send out an email to two dozen people only to discover his distribution list had the entire damn company in it, some 275,000 people, in it instead of the 25 or so he had intended. Walked in that morning to over 50 emails in my inbox and had north of 200 from it by day's end. The next day some muckety muck from corp sent out a company wide email instructing us about the function of the reply all button and I was sitting there at my desk just dumbfounded at how the company was so adept at moving money around but couldn't take a couple of minutes to just yank all of the messages and tell the sender never to do it again.

Left that place about a month or two later. Never going back there again.

Lsherm:Sounds like either someone was literally asleep at the switch or they just didn't give a fark.

As someone outside said distribution group, five timezones away, and not even working for BP directly, but still privy to at least 6 messages from said thread firsthand (none of which the original), I'm gonna have to go with the latter.

Lsherm:As a former mail administrator for a very large organization, there are multiple methods of dealing with this, but all of the easiest ones involve disabling the list for a few hours, or disabling its ability to send, then parsing through queued messages and deleting anything that's a reply-to the original subject line. If it's a true list, then people are just replying to one email address that distributes the email among list members.

Sounds like either someone was literally asleep at the switch or they just didn't give a fark.

These aren't so bad, but we'd have people at my last job(trade show graphics) who would attach a dozen pictures of whatever job we had just completed, and it would bog the system down so badly with the original email full of giant pictures going to everybody, that by the time we got th info stable enough to start dealing with the 'Reply All' crap, 200 or so people had sent out 'Atta Boys' and sometimes their own examples of successful jobs. On top of that, with people on multiple Distribution Lists, they'd sometimes get the message 3 or 4 times, so that our 250 or so users would end up being more like 700 emails. And then you have the people who start whole side conversations from there. We had times where it would be 2 hours before we could even begin to trace the problem.

And you know what does no good? Creating a share on the server and then asking users to put their art in there and send out an email telling people where to look, while asking them NOT to hit 'Reply All'.

My current employer is a sales based company, and people send out emails about big sales, announcing competition between offices and other sales teams, etc., and it was pretty bad when I started there as well, but they got smart. We now use Yammer at work for shiat like that. They are supposed to send all of their 'OMG! Team Boobies FTW, $18,000 going in RIGHT NOW!' stuff that I(among others) have no interest in to the Yammer group. This also helps because you can join groups and only include those. It probably only gets about 40% of the traffic it's supposed to get, since people are mostly incapable of following simple directions and requests, but that is still a noticeable improvement...

CSB: At my last job we made a major change(Can't remember for sure, think it was a new address for webmasters, something like that) 6 weeks or so later, one of our outside sales users came into my office in a panic because it wasn't working for him. After awhile, I figured out that he hadn't made the change that we had requested and had notified people early about. I build him that we'd sent out an email about it and try at he should have received it in plenty of time. His response was 'Oh that... I deleted it, you guys just send SO many emails that I don't bother to read them.', yet he was pissed that he hadn't been notified of this change. As an added bonus, the type of IT emails that he would be on a list to receive might have been one or two a week... Compared to the hundreds a day he'd get from other work sources and customers.

Happened at a company of over 40K where I worked. An IT company, no less. Kee-rist people, it's not that hard to just hit reply, NOT REPLY ALL! I have NEVER accidently done that. (Sent "career-limiting" e-mails to a boss or the whole office, sure, but at the time, it was deliberate.)

Another employer limited bulk sending to certain people with a legit reason. Like the executive secretary who'd denial-of-service attack the mail servers by sending company-wide announcements with return receipt on every one.

It's kind of sad that an organization that big is retarded enough for this to be able to happen. Pretty sure you can deploy Outlook, enterprise wide with the functionality completely disabled. Who needs reply all in a world of cc,bcc and huge distribution lists anyway. I'm pretty sure a 16 year old that just flipped through Baby's First MCSE study book can figure out how to do it, too.

Liinda:At my company, when an exciting news or congratulatory email goes out to an entire department people are actually encouraged to reply all to acknowledge and encourage. It is so frustrating when 50 or more people are racing to be the first to congratulate the kudos email, then responding back and forth in a mass email orgy of unproductive back patting. Drives me crazy.

A good system administrator could write a filter that auto-deleted these messages, most likely based on the "References" found in the header. A BOFH would disable the account of every person replying. Because sometimes you have to punish idiots to get them to learn.

If you are are sending e-mail to more than 3-4 people, the default behavior of your e-mail program should be to remind you if you REALLY want to do such an obnoxious thing. Also, figure out how "CC" and "BCC" work. They do NOT stand for "chocolate chip" and "bacon, chewy or crunchy."

When you're a mere office drone whose mailbox is filled with vapid, inane emails all day, a "reply-all email storm" is a fun distraction. You just sit back and watch the madness as various morons continue to reply all with, "This email wasn't meant for me, please remove me" and pleas to stop replying to all...as they reply all. I just sit back and watch the madness unfold.